If you run a blog or information site you may be interested in the Just Answer (justanswer.com) affiliate program, having recently purchased USAGardener.com the last thing I really wanted were questions emailed to me about gardening that I have neither the knowledge or inclination to deal with so one possible idea is to use the JustAnswer affiliate program.

I was already using this on on few pet sites and it generated the odd sale here and there but putting it on the contact page on USA Gardener appears to be bringing in a sale or two a day just now, nothing massive but convenient and functional.

Ideal if you run an information site and could offer an extra income source as well as take care of particular visitor questions without getting your hands dirty, I’m making sales of around $10-$16 and from that get $1-$3 per sale.

Hello! Been a while eh.. 2010 seems to have just started but were already more than half way through January!
So what’s been happening on the domaining development front?

Domain Leasing: After the flurry of bids and very nice sale of bedroomfurniture.co.uk (which isn’t mine) I suddenly had a good bit of interest in my livingroom & diningroom furniture domains. Weird how that goes, no interest for 12 months and then suddenly 3 different five figure offers, happy to say I leased both mine out for £100 per month each so a nice little gain in the leasing income. The 2 domains were not ranking or developed, both have buy options written in.

Geo’s: I had initially planned to work through the winter adding advertisers to sites like Ullapool.co.uk but it became pretty obvious once the businesses shut down it’s going against the grain trying to get them to spend on next season so I held off, I did initially get some B&B’s on board and some have naturally emailed and signed up as the site ranks top for the town, so that one established site is earning £1350 per year in listing fee’s and would make around £2k per year in adsense based on present numbers, my other geo sites although small in traffic levels are getting really nice clicks on Adsense from 50p to £2 per click so even just now in the winter they add up quite nicely. My geo sites will likely earn around £10,000-£15,000 passively for me in 2010 but if I can get motivated that could easily be doubled year on year. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies for the lack of posts, but when there isn’t much new happening there isn’t much to write about so even with this post I am just going to surmise what I’m doing & thinking but there is nothing new.

Think Visibility was a good break, many thanks to Al for the ticket, good to meet some new & old faces – sorry if I wasn’t overly enthusiastic if I met you on Saturday as Al did keep me out till 6am on the first night Some good talks and I certainly took away a few ideas. What was interesting was listening to the types of sites other people run, amazing diversity in every room & bar.

Domain Leasing: Current income is around £1300 per month from this, the only way for me to really ramp this up is to get a larger inventory but I don’t want a pile of crap so I think it’s a slow burner with the odd addition and still something I’d like to build on. Certainly a nice option to offer someone who can’t afford to outright buy a prime generic.

Geo’s: My collection of geo’s has grown a little and this is where I have invested money & time this year, a few more domains and some new sites on them every few months.

Ullapool.co.uk with only a 1500 population was an existing site already ranking at the top, I have contacted B&B’s & hotels offering a paid listing/advertising, it’s a port and popular area for tourism and breaks away. It now has a yearly income of £1100 from listings and £2k from adsense – the site was bought for £4500 a few months ago.

Ayr.co.uk is the main site in the group as it’s the largest of the small towns around the 50k population mark, it was just a blank domain but has now been built out and ranks in the top 5, happy with it’s progress.

What’s pretty apparent to me now is that with it being off-season the B&B’s are closed down and they have next to no interest in spending money on advertising right now, I think a lot of the geo sites will come into their own next year from February onwards especially if they are visible near the top of Google so that’s really the aim, get the group of domains, build them and get them indexed and get ready for early 2010 when businesses will be spending on advertising.

Other stuff: I have bought a few smaller sites this year, some for myself, some in partnership with a friend, still looking through lists of traffic sites looking for neglected gems of which I am sure there are plenty out there. Every now and again I can spend a day doing detective work for it to end up nowhere chasing my own tail but that’s the thrill of the chase, one such expedition I’ll detail to show how time can pass!

Last week I was doing some product keyword research, check the keyword and found a site at no.1 in Google with a single holding page saying they were no longer taking orders, checked the html and no tracking code or analytics so my gut says they may not realise they own a site getting hundreds of visitors per day.

The domain was a .co.uk , no address in the whois, domain name as registrant.
Archive.org shows their old address & phone number in a contact page which is handy, a bit more digging shows there is a physical shop there with the same phone number but today it’s selling something completely different so I had hoped/presumed a change of direction. I contacted the shop owner but she nothing to do with the old shop or domain I am after. She did manage to give me a name of the old trading company which I had not heard of that used to trade from the shop.

Researching this trading name took me to other sites in the same kind of genre which were still live and finding their contact details I asked if they still owned the domain I was chasing and wanted.

Nope, but he used to, he had sold the site & domain in 2008 but did have the buyers name and mobile phone number which he was happy to pass on to me.

I contacted the buyer who had since resigned as director of the company who bought the domain I am after, but gave me the name of the limited company that he had setup. So I paid £4 at companies house for all the details on this limited company and could see no trading has been done or filed but did get the home address of the existing director of the limited company who owns the domain. I can’t see any trace of this guy online (handy weird surname) so have sent him a snail mail to ask if he would sell the domain.

Will any of this come off? who knows, but it can be fun and when these things do work out you can win big, an excellent tip from Edwin is to take a high ranking site and put it in the Adwords Tool under website content to generate a list of popular keywords to start your research from.

Last week I announced that my lastest site ConferenceCalendar.com will be sponsoring next weekends Think Visibility conference, and as the primary sponsor we receive 4 free tickets. Thanks everybody that left a comment saying why they would like to attend, it was a totally tough to choose a single winner so we’ll be giving away 3 free tickets:

Matt: As reading his comments I think he’d really benefit from attending

Richard: Comment made me laugh and I’ve met Richard before and I’m sure he’ll make the most of the opportunity

Abdul: Another gentleman I’ve known online for a long time that and who I think needs to talk and listen to people that are already somewhat successful in the industry

I’ll also be providing tickets to two of my business partners (as I’m a speaker I get an extra free ticket):

Scott Jones: If you don’t know who Scott is you’re on the wrong site, totally awesome smartest somewhat technophobe I know in the industry and have the pleasure to work with.

Marc Evans: I run the Coolest Gadgets UK site with Marc, he’s a expert .Net coder (I don’t know if that’s what he’d call himself) and a total brainiac on gadgets and technology.

If for any reason anybody listed cannot make it (you’ll need to sort out your own travel and accommodation), please let me know and I’ll give the ticket to somebody else.

If you weren’t lucky enough to win a ticket I would strongly advise taking advantage of the 30% discount code confcal, even before the discount it’s one of the most best value and friendliest conferences in town.

Finally the first 5 people at Think Visibility that tell me in person they read Self Made Minds and use Conference Calendar I’ll buy a beer on the Saturday evening (and I’m sure Scott will match that ).

So far so good with my geo exploits, quick summary; to date for me it’s about building foundations. Initially I chose a target location (West of Scotland) and then went to work trying to acquire local towns, I have worked with a fairly realistic budget spending around £1000 on good sized towns around 10,000 to 20,000 population which I believe to be sounds investments and of good value. I wouldn’t pay that for locations that didn’t have the tourism angle though.

Occasionally I managed to pick up something I felt under priced and occasionally I have had to pay more than I would have liked. When targeting towns & villages my preference so far has been to go for the .co.uk first, usually with no existing site in the case of Ayr & Arran. If that was a no go I have looked at the .org.uk which happened for Kilmarnock. If that was a no go then I google the town and looked at the top 10 to see if there was something suitable & established to buy which was the case for Kilwinning (.org) And in some cases so far I have not been able to get anything. Read the rest of this entry »

Think Visibility Conference – Saturday 12 September 2009

I was speaking to my friend Dom AKA @TheHodge a few days ago about the next Think Visibility conference that he’s organising. I thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from the first one and for the one next month I am lined up on some mystery panel alongside Chris Garrett, Patrick Altoft and Kieron Donoghue (I’ve no idea what the panel is about but knowing Hodge it will be fun).

Anyway it turned out that Think Visibilty still didn’t have a primary sponsor and as it’s pretty related to my latest site Conference Calendar, I thought it would be a good marketing experiment to offer sponsorship, so that’s what we’ve done (I will report back after the event about the ROI).

I was able to talk Dom into giving our readers an awesome discount code of 30% (details on the Conference Calendar Think Visibility page), so if you haven’t booked your ticket yet now is the time (it was good value before, now it’s a must see).

I’ve also got a few tickets I can give away, the first of which will be to a SMM reader. Simply leave a comment on this post explaining why you would like to attend and we’ll choose a winner that we think has the best reason.

Good luck and if you don’t win at least you’ll be able to benefit from the 30% discount.

Some time ago I did a post about putting the shop window software on a domain for affiliate sales, I pretty much have forgotten about the site but was asked for an update on the script and how it was doing.

site: Lumens.co.uk

Category: Lighting

Current traffic: 100-250 visitors per day

Improvements made, after installing the software I had someone make the url’s more seo friendly and created my own categories using the search function along with some unique text/description at the top for some of the categories.

I also bought a template from templatemonster I think for a basic design to make the front of the site look better and less like an aff site.

Over the last month the site made the following sales;

All-up-and-on: 407 clicks, generating 7 sales, £644.65 in sales
Haysom lighting:  265 clicks, 2 sales,  £228.94 in sales
DIY Tools: 60 clicks, 2 sales, £276.47 in sales
Screwfix: 59 clicks, 3 sales, £225.51 in sales
Pricerighthome.com: 47 clicks, 3 sales, £34.57 in sales
Rapid electronics: 31 clicks, 1 sale, £6.28 in sales
Expert Verdict: 21 clicks, 1 sale, £1.50 in sales

So around 890 clicks through to a merchant from the site generating 19 sales of just over £1400. Not exactly massive or overly impressive but again it’s a zero maintenance site, I don’t think it’s worth pumping out sites like this though, not real value so could disappear overnight unless you really worked on it to build new content & information in the way of reviews or ran alongside a blog.

My thoughts on the advantages that working on a geographical domain has over starting a product based or aff website.

1. You don’t need the same traffic numbers, if trying to appeal to local B&B’s/Guesthouses & businesses for advertising you don’t need to be aiming for 10,000 visitors per day, getting 100-300 visitors per day can suffice. That makes the return on investment and time spent much quicker and more appealing. From the few sites I have up that are around a month or so old they all get around 50 visitors per day just based on the few articles each site has. Almost time to start looking for advertising, that’s not the way it usually works. Read the rest of this entry »

Morning folks! Over the last 4 weeks I have pretty much being having fun developing a little geo area in the West of Scotland so wanted to share my observations.

Initially I bought Arran, Ayr and Largs – I then remembered I own westofscotland.co.uk so decided to use that as the umbrella domain to link to them all from. I also picked up a few others all beside each other and all small but touristy kind of places on the coastline to make a little set of 7.

Minisites: I have seen a lot written and said about minisites which strikes me as sweeping statements, if you look at www.largs.co.uk that’s a minisite. Minisites are evolving, Largs cost me under £200 and for that I get a theme on Wordpress, research is done and around 7 to 10 articles are created without my input. It’s then all put together with work on descriptions, tags and keywords, after which I added some feeds for extra pages, but it pretty much ticks all the minisite boxes.

To say minisites are not worthwhile, useless or will not give you a return on your investment is like saying “websites” are not worthwhile. Websites like minisites come in a variety of flavours and if done well can be very worthwhile, but they can be crap and a waste of virtual space if done poorly.

I am negotiation for an established but tiny tourist location in Scotland with a population of 1500! the owner has had the domain/site for 12 years, it makes £3000 per year. He hasn’t updated it in years but wants it to go to a good home, I offered £2700 and was rejected no surprise, he wants £5500 which is a fair price, after showing him Ayr.co.uk & Arran.co.uk he has agreed to sell the site to me below his £5500 valuation as he wants it to go to a good home and likes what I am doing. So these new minisites have value that other’s can see.

Feeds: I know pulling in feeds doesn’t add traffic/real content but from a user experience it makes the site more appealing and complete, adding twitter, pictures, video, jobs, weather, property, events and games gives a better user experience from the off. I have tested this on people who work offline and have had good feedback. I am however looking down the line a bit to find a local estate agent to offer their feed exclusively for a fee.

Links: One thing I have noticed is asking for links for the generic place name .co.uk seems very easy with positive replies. I even emailed the local council and asked for a link on their .gov.uk which was up and live within 30 minutes. Emailing others sites who do info on the places often gets a quick “Hi Scott, that’s been done now” which is very different from dealing with product related sites, the exact match generic domain maybe helps or maybe geo sites are much nicer to work in when it comes to sharing links.

Some local hotels & resorts have link & info pages, I decided to make sure when asking for a link from them I email the PR & Marketing person, not the webmaster. Not only did I get a link from them I also got a typical reponse from the marketing person asking about the site, “is it new and how much for a homepage advert?”, much better than me asking them to advertise.

Twitter: I created a twitter account and followed quite a few people who mentioned the areas, in some cases people mention they are about to or have just been to the town. This seems a good opportunity to ask for user submitted content and I have a couple of people who have agreed to write reviews based on me contacting and posting on Twitter.

I have to say I am enjoying these sites, some are in development or live but under month old, they are starting to bring in around 50 visitors per day each. All in all a good excercise and a good set of info minisites that I feel have good potential to generate income. If someone can make £3k a year from a population of 1500 then the towns with 10k or 40k I also have should offer opportunity once established to earn their keep.

It’s been a while since we’ve done a Friday round-up and as I’ve seen a few interesting things this week I thought I’d care to share, so here goes:

Analytics360 – This nifty little WordPress plugin lets you view your Google Analytics data in your WP dashboard (found via BlogStorm).

Introducing Rich Snippets – Google are rolling out some changes to how certain SERPS are displayed (namely reviews and people). If you have a review site, you can now provide Google with extra information to display in the snippet. (via Rishil on twitter).

Sometimes Quitting Is The Only Way to Win – Interesting read on why it may be a smart move to quit.

Think Visibility – Tickets are now on sale for this excellent mini conference and I am certain it’ll sell out. If you can get to Leeds on September 12th I’d strongly recommend it.

Bing using DMOZ Description – For those of you living under a rock Bing is Microsoft’s new(ish) search offering. This article demonstrates how the SERP snippets are extracted from DMOZ and more importantly how to ensure they are not.

Call to action experiment – Great post showing the results on how changing the wording on a call to action statement increased actions from 4.7 to 12.81%, nice (via ChrisG).

Even found a game for you to waste a few minutes with, Neon Maze.